Broadcast network content or programming is commonly provided in conjunction with associated informational content or assets. These assets include advertisements, associated programming, public-service announcements, ad tags, trailers, weather or emergency notifications and a variety of other content, including paid and unpaid content. In this regard, assets providers (e.g., advertisers) who wish to convey information (e.g., advertisements) regarding services and/or products to users of the broadcast network often pay for the right to insert their information into programming of the broadcast network. For instance, advertisers may provide ad content to a network operator such that the ad content may be interleaved with broadcast network programming during one or more programming breaks. The delivery of such paid assets often subsidizes or covers the costs of the programming provided by the broadcast network. This may reduce or eliminate costs borne by the users of the broadcast network programming.
In order to achieve a better return on their investment, asset providers often try to target their assets to a selected audience that is believed to be interested in the goods or services of the asset provider. The case of advertisers on a cable television network is illustrative. For instance, an advertiser or a cable television network may target its ads to certain demographic groups based on, for example, geographic location, gender, age, income etc. Accordingly, once an advertiser has created an ad that is targeted to a desired group of viewers (e.g., targeted group) the advertiser may attempt to procure insertion times in the network programming when the targeted group is expected to be among the audience of the network programming.
Various asset targeting systems have been proposed in the context of targeting ads to individual households (e.g., targeted households) in a cable television network. In one implementation, an asset targeting system is capable of selecting ads for delivery to a particular household based on known information associated with that household. In this regard, various data repositories (i.e., third party databases) may contain information associated with, for example, purchasing information, demographic information, etc. associated with the individual household. Accordingly, this third party database information is utilized to select ads for delivery to the household that are of putative interest to members of the household. After delivery, these ads can be stored by a user equipment device (e.g., set top box) of the household and inserted in a subsequent commercial spot.